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Laser SETI Crowdfunding Campaign Meets its $100K Goal!

More than 500 of you helped us meet our fundraising goal of $100K for our new Laser SETI project.

Laser SETI is a groundbreaking new approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It will place specialized cameras around the globe to look for laser flashes from deep space, scanning the whole sky all the time for signals.

Until now, SETI experiments, whether listening for a radio transmitter or searching for a high-powered laser, have assumed that ET is on-the-air all the time, so that wherever the instrument is pointed, the signal will be there.

Laser SETI is the first experiment to circumvent this assumption.

Laser SETI could find a very short ping from anywhere on the night sky. Indeed, it could detect a laser flash as short as a millisecond or less; and one that might not repeat for days, weeks, or even longer. Or ever.

Searching all-the-sky all-the-time is an essential capability when looking for intermittent signals. Radio experiments will someday be able to do that, but Laser SETI will be able to that now, thanks to your help.

As we’ve said repeatedly throughout the Laser SETI campaign, we’re all about efficiency, and now that we’re looking at actuals instead of projections, there’s a possibility we may be able to deliver the dual-site system! That would validate the entire system and allow us to begin true wide-field SETI operations.

We will continue to keep you updated on the progress of Laser SETI.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this exciting endeavor.

If you’re interested in supporting Laser SETI, or any of the SETI Institute’s work, please click here.